(Decanter) - Andrew Jefford hears the Napa Mountain story from one of its most thoughtful practitioners, Chris Howell of Cain.

We left the 4×4 in a clearing, and walked up a track to some of the estate’s highest vineyards.  The only sound, apart from the wind, were the cascading, slow-fade screams of the red-tailed hawks as they tussled for territory.  The contours of the hills fell about chaotically.

Or so it seemed to me — but Chris Howell provided orientation.  “We’re up on the watershed which divides Napa from Sonoma.  A blanket of cold air comes in off the ocean, which lies 35 miles to the west, over there.” He pointed to where a zone of brighter light lay, seamed above the late-afternoon horizon.  I looked along the faint ridgeline he’d indicated.  A single tree punctuated the tan gold of the grasses.  The prevailing wind had given it an easterly stoop.

This is Spring Mountain, and were about to walk the steep slopes where Cain Five comes into being.  Howell has grown this distinctively savoury, earthy estate wine since 1991, as well as the plumper and more sensual Cain Concept, a Napa benchland wine made from bought fruit and sold as ‘library stock’ (see notes below), and the lighter Cain Cuvée, which melds different sources and two vintages.  I always enjoy talking to Howell, a philosophy graduate-turned-winemaker with a mind as rangy and upredictable as the hills of the Cain estate (now owned by software entrepreneur Jim Meadlock).